Bay Windows - December 4, 2003
Andrew Rapp, arapp@baywindows.com.

Mitch was a North Carolina native and a gay man with AIDS. In 1997 he was only in his early forties but had stopped working because of his illness. Previously, he had a distinguished career in Washington, D.C., working his way up through the ranks to become chief of staff for a powerful senator.

For most of that time Mitch was closeted. He had lived the "D.C. double life." His Senate colleagues knew him as a hard-charging, solitary workaholic, and his friends knew him as a fun-loving gay man who spent holidays in Europe carousing with boyfriends.

It wasn't until he was diagnosed with HIV that his two worlds joined. He came out to his co-workers and, after leaving his Senate job, began working for a variety of gay-rights causes. That was when we met. He was my boss on an unsuccessful campaign to defeat Senator Jesse Helms in his 1996 re-election bid.

For that Thanksgiving dinner we were joined by Mitch's elderly parents, a steel magnolia and her retired husband. His brother, a tough vice cop from Charlotte, came, as did his sister, a stylish young banking professional. By this time they all knew Mitch was gay and his illness was unmistakable.

While Mitch helped his mother prepare in the kitchen, I pretended to watch football with his brother and father in the living room. I noticed a photograph on a shelf of a husky, dark-haired man I didn't recognize and asked who it was. His father didn't respond. His brother just said, "It's Mitch."

That day Mitch looked as I'd always known him. He was gaunt, with less than 150 pounds stretched over his six-foot-tall frame. His hair was white, cheeks sunken in, and lips chapped.

Mitch made it through five minutes of dinner before the inevitable struck. He rushed to the bathroom where he spent a half-hour throwing up, as he did after ingesting most anything. The rest of us sat at the table, eating quietly over Mitch's audible wretching just down the hall. His mother teared up, but otherwise there was no indication from anyone that day that Mitch was sick, or that he was dying.

I would have similar strange, affected interactions with Mitch's family until his death. He wasted down to less than 120 pounds and became immobilized by neuropathy. His right eye and part of his skull were removed to halt a fungal infection. And all this passed with less comment than might be devoted to a head cold. I never witnessed any acknowledgement from his family that Mitch was gay or that he had AIDS.

I presumed that at some point the pure horror of Mitch's decline would overwhelm these silences. I thought his family would learn a language, even if just out of necessity, to describe how their son could look older than his father, older than anything but a skeleton, while still shy of his fiftieth birthday.

But, as had been true for much of Mitch's life, the shame of being gay and the stigma of having AIDS were powerful. They endured through awkward holiday dinners, an inconceivably horrible illness, and finally, longer than Mitch himself.

Dec. 1 was World AIDS Day. If you don't know your HIV status, get tested and talk about AIDS with those you love.

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